Social Tagging as a Knowledge Organization and Resource Discovery Tool

Abstract

Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the social tagging phenomenon, including how it evolved and the debate surrounding its benefits and limitations. Further, social tagging's potential as a new tool for knowledge organization and resources discovery will be considered. Finally, some questions concerning social tagging will be presented for future research. The paper reflects an interdisciplinary overview of the technical aspect of social tagging along with a behavioural look at why and how it is used as a tool to discover and organize knowledge.

Knowledge organization content in graduate coursework

“…ICT has caused drastic departure from the ways classification, indexing, authority control, etc., were performed. KO tools therefore have to cope with an ever-expanding knowledge base, consistent with the findings of studies conducted by a number of researchers (Allam, 2010; Hsieh-Yee, 2004; Hodge, 2000; Urs and Angrosh, 2008; Walsh, 2010; Wiggins, 2007). KO and information retrieval schemes need to have an insight into certain fundamental aspects.…”

“…While being inclusive to KO, the interdisciplinary nature between KO and information and KM places emphasis on metadata, data mining, info-maps, knowledge maps, taxonomy, ontologies and other strategies for organizing an organization’s explicit and tacit knowledge (Shi-yan et al , 2005; Urs and Angrosh, 2008). Eventually, over the past decade, users have contributed to developing organizational schema in the form of social tagging, folksonomies and clouds (Allam, 2010; Weller, 2008; Kim et al , 2010; Kasten, 2007).…”

“…Each LIS program uses different titles and labels for KO courses, which differ in coverage and content. Some relevant KO content can be categorized as information and knowledge maps (Dodge, 2005; Bargent, 2001), indexing tools (Hjørland, 2008, Anderson and Perez-Carballo, 2001), thesauri (Hill et al , 2002), metadata (Hsieh-Yee, 2004) KM, subject headings (Hodge, 2000; Walsh, 2010; Wiggins, 2007) taxonomy, ontology (Urs and Angrosh, 2008) and social tagging (Allam, 2010). Some LIS schools offer advanced courses, both core and elective, which are devoted solely to KO, using the schemes such as classification, subject headings, Machine-Readable (MARC)-based cataloging and metadata.…”

“…Social tagging is also known as collaborative tagging or folksonomy. Allam (2010) defined social tagging as an alternative to the traditional forms of indexing. Social tagging makes it easy for end-users to describe information items and have access to other users’ descriptions.…”